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Cisco includes Virtual Experience Infrastructure to its Jabber conferencing platform

The potential advantages of video conferencing are appealing and many organizations are implementing this technology. It is significant for connecting participants from different parts around the globe to support collaborative work.

In order to enhance productivity by integrating presence, Cisco has announced plans to extend its Jabber conferencing platform by adding support for virtual machines.

With this enhancement, the customers will be able to get the Virtual Experience Infrastructure (VXI) to customers who rely on thin clients and virtualized instances to support employees and remote workers. The company has done so to make exchange of information more breezily and naturally.

The use of VXI Media Engine software will enable clients to interface directly with the unified communications server and connect to other phones and computers just as an on-premise VoIP system would.

Phil Sherburne, vice president of engineering for Cisco smart solutions, said that traditionally a user would have to connect back with the datacenter hosting the virtual machine, placing added load on the network connection and throttling performance.

"There were a lot of issues about moving voice and video across this interface," he said.

"Now, at the end of the day the voice and video is not flowing back to the DC, rather it is flowing to the other endpoints."

Further, he said that fields such as remote customer support can take advantage of the service to allow operators to work remotely rather than in "phone bank" facilities, improving employee flexibility and morale.

The company said that the service will launch in 2013 with support for Cisco thin clients, Dell Wyse clients and Windows virtual machines.

"For some number of years there has been all talk that soft clients would be replacing the phones, it has not yet and part of the reason is people like a lot of the tactile experience of using a phone," said in a statement, Sherbune.